PETER ALONE WITH JESUS

‘The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.’—LUKE
xxiv. 34.

The other appearances of the risen Lord to individuals on the
day of Resurrection are narrated with much particularity, and at considerable length.
John gives us the lovely account of our Lord’s conversation with Mary Magdalene,
Luke gives us in full detail the story of the interview with the two travellers
on the road to Emmaus. Here is another appearance, known to ‘the eleven, and them
that were with them’ on the Resurrection evening, and enumerated by Paul in his
list of the appearances of the Lord, the account of which was the common gospel
of himself and all the others, and yet deep silence is preserved in regard to it.
No word escaped Peter’s lips as to what passed in the conversation between the denier
and his Lord. That is very significant.

The other appearances of the risen Lord to individuals on the
day of Resurrection suggest their own reasons. He appeared first to Mary Magdalene
because she loved much. The love that made a timid woman brave, and the sorrow that
filled her heart, to the exclusion of everything else, drew Jesus to her. The two
on the road to Emmaus were puzzled, honest, painful seekers after truth. It was
worth Christ’s while to spend hours of that day of Resurrection in clearing, questioning,
and confirming sincere minds. Does not this other appearance explain itself? The
brief spasm of cowardice and denial had changed into penitence when the Lord looked,
and the bitter tears that fell were not only because of the denial, but because
of the wound of that sharp arrow, the poisoned barb of which we are happy if we
have not felt the thought—‘He will never know how ashamed and miserable I am; and
His last look was reproach, and I shall never see His face any more.’ To respond
to, and to satisfy, love, to clear and to steady thought, to soothe the agony of
a penitent, were worthy works for the risen Lord. I venture to think that such a
record of the use of such a day bears historical truth on its very face, because
it is so absolutely unlike what myth-making or hallucination, or the excited imagination
of enthusiasts would have produced, if these had been the sources of the story of
the Resurrection. But apart from that, I wish in this sermon to try to gather the
suggestions that come to us from this interview, and from the silence which is observed
concerning them.

With regard to—

I. The fact of the appearance itself.

We can only come into the position rightly to understand its precious
significance, if we try to represent to ourselves the state of mind of the man to
whom it was granted. I have already touched upon that; let me, in the briefest possible
way, recapitulate. As I have said, the momentary impulse to the cowardly crime passed,
and left a melted heart, true penitence, and profound sorrow. One sad day slowly
wore away. Early on the next came the message which produced an effect on Peter
so great, that the gospel, which in some sense is his gospel (I mean that ‘according
to Mark’) alone contains the record of it—the message from the open grave: ‘Tell
my disciples and Peter that I go before you into Galilee.’ There followed
the sudden rush to the grave, when the feet made heavy by a heavy conscience were
distanced by the light step of happy love, and ‘the other disciple did outrun Peter.’
The more impulsive of the two dashed into the sepulchre, just as he afterwards threw
himself over the side of the boat, and floundered through the water to get to his
Lord’s feet, whilst John was content with looking, just as he afterwards was content
to sit in the boat and say, ‘It is the Lord.’ But John’s faith, too, outran Peter’s,
and he departed ‘believing,’ whilst Peter only attained to go away ‘wondering.’
And so another day wore away, and at some unknown hour in it, Jesus stood before
Peter alone.

What did that appearance say to the penitent man? Of course, it
said to him what it said to all the rest, that death was conquered. It lifted his
thoughts of his Master. It changed his whole atmosphere from gloom to sunshine,
but it had a special message for him. It said that no fault, no denial, bars or
diverts Christ’s love. Peter, no doubt, as soon as the hope of the Resurrection
began to dawn upon him, felt fear contending with his hope, and asked himself, ‘If
He is risen, will He ever speak to me again?’ And now here He is with a quiet look
on His face that says, ‘Notwithstanding thy denial, see, I have come to thee.’

Ah, brethren! the impulsive fault of a moment, so soon repented
of, so largely excusable, is far more venial than many of our denials. For a continuous
life in contradiction to our profession is a blacker crime than a momentary fall,
and they who, year in and year out, call themselves Christians, and deny their profession
by the whole tenor of their lives, are more deeply guilty than was the Apostle,
But Jesus Christ comes to us, and no sin of ours, no denial of ours, can bar out
His lingering, His reproachful, and yet His restoring, love and grace. All sin is
inconsistent with the Christian profession. Blessed be God; we can venture to say
that no sin is incompatible with it, and none bars off wholly the love that pours
upon us all. True; we may shut it out. True; so long as the smallest or the greatest
transgression is unacknowledged and unrepented, it forms a non-conducting medium
around us, and isolates us from the electric touch of that gracious love. But also
true; it is there hovering around us, seeking an entrance. If the door be shut,
still the knocking finger is upon it, and the great heart of the Knocker is waiting
to enter. Though Peter had been a denier, because he was a penitent the Master came
to him. No fault, no sin, cuts us off from the love of our Lord.

And then the other great lesson, closely connected with this,
but yet capable of being treated separately for a moment, which we gather from the
fact of the interview, is that Jesus Christ is always near the sorrowing heart that
confesses its evil. He knew of Peter’s penitence, if I might so say, in the grave;
and, therefore, risen, His feet hasted to comfort and to soothe him. As surely as
the shepherd hears the bleat of the lost sheep in the snowdrift, as surely as the
mother hears the cry of her child, so surely is a penitent heart a magnet which
draws Christ, in all His potent fullness and tenderness, to itself. He that heard
and knew the tears of the denier, and his repentance, when in the dim regions of
the dead, no less hears and knows the first faint beginnings of sorrow for sin,
and bends down from His seat on the right hand of God, saying, ‘I dwell in the high
and holy place, with him also that is of a humble and contrite spirit, to revive
the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.’ No fault
bars Christ’s love. Christ is ever near the penitent spirit; and whilst he is yet
a great way off, He has compassion, and runs and falls on his neck and kisses him.

Now let us look at—

II. The interview of which we know nothing.

We know nothing of what did pass; we know what must have passed.
There is only one way by which a burdened soul can get rid of its burden. There
is only one thing that a conscience-stricken denier can say to his Saviour. And—blessed
be God!—there is only one thing that a Saviour can say to a conscience-stricken
denier. There must have been penitence with tears; there must have been full absolution
and remission. And so we are not indulging in baseless fancies when we say that
we know what passed in that conversation, of which no word ever escaped the lips
of either party concerned. So then, with that knowledge, just let me dwell upon
one or two considerations suggested.

One is that the consciousness of Christ’s love, uninterrupted
by our transgression, is the mightiest power to deepen penitence and the consciousness
of unworthiness. Do you not think that when the Apostle saw in Christ’s face, and
heard from His lips, the full assurance of forgiveness, he was far more ashamed
of himself than he had ever been in the hours of bitterest remorse? So long as there
blends with the sense of my unworthiness any doubt about the free, full, unbroken
flow of the divine love to me, my sense of my own unworthiness is disturbed. So
long as with the consciousness of demerit there blends that thought—which often
is used to produce the consciousness, viz., the dread of consequences, the fear
of punishment—my consciousness of sin is disturbed. But sweep away fear of penalty,
sweep away hesitation as to the divine love, then I am left face to face with the
unmingled vision of my own evil, and ten thousand times more than ever before do
I recognise how black my transgression has been; as the prophet puts it with profound
truth, ‘Thou shalt be ashamed and confounded, and never open thy mouth any more,
because of thy sins, when I am pacified towards thee for all that thou hast done.’
If you would bring a man to know how bad he is, do not brandish a whip before his
face, or talk to him about an angry God. You may bray a fool in a mortar, and his
foolishness will not depart from him. You may break a man down with these violent
pestles, and you will do little more. But get him, if I may continue the metaphor,
not into the mortar, but set him in the sunshine of the divine love, and that will
do more than break, it will melt the hardest heart that no pestle would do anything
but triturate. The great evangelical doctrine of full and free forgiveness through
Jesus Christ produces a far more vital, vigorous, transforming recoil from transgression
than anything besides. ‘Do we make void the law through faith? God forbid! Yea,
we establish the law.’

Then, further, another consideration may be suggested, and that
is that the acknowledgment of sin is followed by immediate forgiveness. Do you think
that when Peter turned to his Lord, who had come from the grave to soothe him, and
said, ‘I have sinned,’ there was any pause before He said, ‘and thou art forgiven’?
The only thing that keeps the divine love from flowing into a man’s heart is the
barrier of unforgiven, because unrepented, sin. So soon as the acknowledgment of
sin takes away the barrier—of course, by a force as natural as gravitation—the river
of God’s love flows into the heart. The consciousness of forgiveness may be gradual;
the fact of forgiveness is instantaneous. And the consciousness may be as instantaneous
as the fact, though it often is not. ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins’; and
I believe that a man, that you, may at one moment be held and bound by the chains
of sin, and that at the next moment, as when the angel touched the limbs of this
very Apostle in prison, the chains may drop from off ankles and wrists, and the
prisoner may be free to follow the angel into light and liberty. Sometimes the change
is instantaneous, and there is no reason why it should not be an instantaneous change,
experienced at this moment, by any man or woman among us. Sometimes it is gradual.
The Arctic spring comes with a leap, and one day there is thick-ribbed ice, and
a few days after there are grass and flowers. A like swift transformation is within
the limits of possibility for any of us, and—blessed be God! within the experience
of a good many of us. There is no reason why it should not be that of each of us,
as well as of this Apostle.

Then there is one other thought that I would suggest, viz., that
the man who is led through consciousness of sin and experience of uninterrupted
love which is forgiveness, is thereby led into a higher and a nobler life. Peter’s
bitter fall, Peter’s gracious restoration, were no small part of the equipment which
made him what we see him in the days after Pentecost—when the coward that had been
ashamed to acknowledge his Master, and all whose impulsive and self-reliant devotion
passed away before a flippant servant-girl’s tongue, stood before the rulers of
Israel, and said: ‘Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more
than unto God, judge ye!’ The sense of sin, the assurance of pardon, shatter a man’s
unwholesome self-confidence, and develop his self-reliance based upon his trust
in Jesus Christ. The consciousness of sin, and the experience of pardon, deepen
and make more operative in life the power of the divine love. Thus, the publicans
and the harlots do go into the Kingdom of God many a time before the Pharisees.
So let us all be sure that even our sins and faults may be converted into stepping
stones to higher things.

III. Lastly, notice the deep silence in which this interview is
shrouded.

I have already pointed to the occupations of that Resurrection
day as bearing on their face the marks of veracity. It seems to me that if the story
of the Resurrection is not history, the talk between the denier and the Master would
have been a great deal too tempting a subject for romancers of any kind to have
kept their hands off. If you read the apocryphal gospels you will see how eager
they are to lay hold of any point in the true gospels, and spin a whole farrago
of rubbish round about it. And do you think they could ever have let this incident
alone without spoiling it by expanding it, and putting all manner of vulgarities
into their story about it? But the men who told the story were telling simple facts,
and when they did not know anything they said nothing.

But why did not Peter say anything about it? Because nobody had
anything to do with it but himself and his Master. It was his business, and no one
else’s. The other scene by the lake reinstated him in his office, and it was public
because it concerned others also; but what passed when he was restored to his faith
was of no concern to any one but the Restorer and the restored. And so, dear friends,
a religion which has a great deal to say about its individual experiences is in
very slippery places. The less you think about your emotions, and eminently the
less you talk about them, the sounder, the truer, and the purer they will be. Goods
in a shop-window get fly-blown very quickly, and lose their lustre. All the deep
secrets of a man’s life, his love for his Lord, the way by which he came to Him,
his penitence for his sin, like his love for his wife, had better speak in deeds
than in words to others. Of course while that is true on one side, we are not to
forget the other side. Reticence as to the secret things of my own personal experience
is never to be extended so as to include silence as to the fact of my Christian
profession. Sometimes it is needful, wise, and Christlike for a man to lift the
corner of the bridal curtain, and let in the day to some extent, and to say, ‘Of
whom I am chief, but I obtained mercy.’ Sometimes there is no such mighty power
to draw others to the faith which we would fain impart, as to say, ‘Whether this
Man be a sinner or no, I know not; but one thing I know, that whereas I was blind
now I see.’ Sometimes—always—a man must use his own personal experience, cast into
general forms, to emphasise his profession, and to enforce his appeals. So very
touchingly, if you will turn to Peter’s sermons in the Acts, you will find that
he describes himself there (though he does not hint that it is himself) when he
appeals to his countrymen, and says, ‘Ye denied the Holy One and the Just.’ The
personal allusion would make his voice vibrate as he spoke, and give force to the
charge. Similarly, in the letter which goes by his name—the second of the two Epistles
of Peter—there is one little morsel of evidence that makes one inclined to think
that it is his, notwithstanding the difficulties in the way, viz., that he sums
up all the sins of the false teachers whom he is denouncing in this: ‘Denying the
Lord that bought them.’ But with these limitations, and remembering that the statement
is not one to be unconditionally and absolutely put, let the silence with regard
to this interview teach us to guard the depths of our own Christian lives.

Now, dear brethren, have you ever gone apart with Jesus Christ,
as if He and you were alone in the world? Have you ever spread out all your denials
and faults before Him? Have you ever felt the swift assurance of His forgiving love,
covering over the whole heap, which dwindles as His hand lies upon it? Have you
ever felt the increased loathing of yourselves which comes with the certainty that
He has passed by all your sins? If you have not, you know very little about Christ,
or about Christianity (if I may use the abstract word) or about yourselves; and
your religion, or what you call your religion, is a very shallow and superficial
and inoperative thing. Do not shrink from being alone with Jesus Christ. There is
no better place for a guilty man, just as there is no better place for an erring
child than its mother’s bosom. When Peter had caught a dim glimpse of what Jesus
Christ was, he cried: ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!’ When he knew
his Saviour and himself better, he clung to Him because he was so sinful. Do the
same, and He will say to you: ‘Son, thy sins be forgiven thee; Daughter, thy faith
hath made thee whole. Go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.’